Help Me Read My Nitrites (fishless Cycle)

Hello,
I get a bit frustrated with my API master test kit sometimes. I find the colors hard to read. Usually nirtrites are the easiest, but I'm having a hard time with this.
What would you say this is? 2ppm?

While we're at it, how about my nitrates? I find it impossible to tell the difference between 40 and 80. I know for tank maintenaince it shouldn't be that big of a deal, since you would want to do a water change any time it's over 20, but for fishless cycling I would really like to see if the nitrates are going up...

If the nitrites are in fact 2, do you think I should do a water change? Yesterday was the first day I saw nitrites. Yesterday it was clearly .25.

And finally, since we're on the subject, anyone know of a better test kit that's easier to read? I haven't been able to find one.

Wow, thanks for the input. So interesting, because it looks much more purple to me than the .25. 2 days ago it was the baby Blue of 0, yesterday it looked to me to match the .25 exactly (like an indigo color), and today I see much more red/purple. It's definitely not as dark as the .5 and 1, but I see more of the red like in the 2 and 3, but it just looks more washed out than those colors.
Thank you though! I won't worry about doing water changes right now. Cycling seems to be proceeding on...

Wow, thanks for the input. So interesting, because it looks much more purple to me than the .25. 2 days ago it was the baby Blue of 0, yesterday it looked to me to match the .25 exactly (like an indigo color), and today I see much more red/purple. It's definitely not as dark as the .5 and 1, but I see more of the red like in the 2 and 3, but it just looks more washed out than those colors.
Thank you though! I won't worry about doing water changes right now. Cycling seems to be proceeding on...

Click to expand...

Using this test kit gives me flash backs to my Color and Composition class in college. I never thought color mixing would be a useful skill outside of painting! My advice is to look for the amount of color change and not how saturated the color is. So with nitrites, look for how much red has mixed into the blue, not how dark it is. Yours looks just under 2 to me. Any nitrates between 40 and 80 is just red. The chart shows juuust a little shift in the amount of yellow, but not enough to be practical in pinning down a number. It's very frustrating!

So I did the dilution test, and it looked pretty much the same (40?) so I'm going to go with 80 for the nitrates.

I repeated the nitrite test and watched it during five minute wait time, which actually really helped. At 1 minute it went to .25, at 2 minutes it was .5, and then at 3 minutes it looked like 1, and didn't get any darker after that. For some reason it was easier to make out the color if I was watching it change.

Also, I've found that taking photos of the test results under more or less uniform conditions (e.g. flash, against white paper), and then pulling a hue using a color picker app can help discern whether one test is showing a higher or lower result than the last test. It's colorimetry on the super-cheap!

In a happy turn of events my nitrites were back to zero this morning
That was a quick nitrite spike (not that I'm complaining)!
I think there is a good chance that they were already falling when I retested last night and got 1, so I'm guessing my first pic was over 1 as several of you said.
Thanks!